Vox Silva

Nothing's more of a first world problem than WiFi not working on your flight.

While I'm not lactose intolerant I have a lot of friends who are, and so as a generous host I like to keep Lactaid on hand.

I try not to be on my iPhone (hence my guides for automatically making it grayscale and not knowing your Screen Time code).

As part of my previous post reverse engineering the Denon XML API I talked about my love for the Golf sound effects in Nintendo Switch Sports, complete with a way to build an ambient soundscape.

My home audio system goes through a Denon AVR-X1700H as the primary receiver.

For my 400 Divisadero series and to help track down some stolen property from my girlfriend I needed to figure out who owned a given building in SF.

I wrote up a dump of all Venmo deeplinks back in 2017.

Reverse engineering apps is made a lot easier with the source code, but apps distributed through the App store are encrypted with FairPlay encryption, making decompilation much harder.

Fleurons, and other printer's ornaments are decorative elements used in typography.

While Elon's purchase of Twitter knocked me off the platform for a bit, I returned for bad political takes, mediocre housing takes, good energy takes, and a surfeit of memes.

I will be the first to admit that I'm sometimes bad at responding to texts — but I'm not 112-unread-messages bad, as the notification badge on my Mac makes me out to be.

If there's one thing that I've internalized from years of work, it's that if you do something twice, write it down.

My brother Spencer works as an artist in Asheville.

I have Captcha set up for comments on this blog but stuff can still get through.

I am doing a series of blog posts diving into 400 Divisadero Street, a defunct car wash and gas station in San Francisco that they're trying to turn into apartments — and have been for over a decade without breaking ground.

All of my websites and projects run off a single 18GB EC2 instance.

I have a penchant for having way too many tabs of Chrome open, and even though I keep buying more RAM I occasionally am still forced to interact with this screen, informing me that I have run out of memory.

I am unfortunately spending more and more of my time interacting with LLMs through terminal interfaces.

I was recently reverse-engineering parts of the OpenTable API, and wasn't sure how to refresh the Bearer token.

How to inspect hover elements in Chrome by pressing F8 twice while DevTools is open to the Sources tab

Shrink webfont file sizes with pyftsubset to speed up loading and save bandwidth.

Create custom emoji handshakes using yellow hands like 🫱‍🫲🏿 and 🫱🏿‍🫲.

The mouse click recording feature in macOS video recording is really helpful for showing what you're doing (and something that I've used for videos for this blog previously, such in my writeup on how to set your screen time passcode without knowing it).

If you have a long password, running a command with sudo can be a bit of a pain.

As you may have noticed by my propensity for footnotes sidenotes I love asides.

You can delete your address from your footer as long as you keep the REWARDS piece.

Flickr has restricted original size downloads of images uploaded by free accounts, but you can get around this with Dev Tools.

Back in college I ran a service called Dog-a-Day, where I emailed subscribers a picture of a dog every day, along with a fun caption.

I bought a cheap push button combination lock and fell down a rabbit hole when I realized it didn't matter what order you entered the code in.

I used to use Mint as my budgeting software until it shut down in March 2024.

I was watching The Killing the other day, Kubrick's third feature film from 1956.

Because the default Apple Podcasts on macOS only allows you to copy 200 words of transcript at a time, I built a quick website back in January that allows you to view and copy the full thing.

I was hitting a problem where some VSCode plugins I use were erroring out when running commands.

The QR codes for Fitness SF started changing.

Like I said in my last post, I'm a big fan of my phone being in grayscale, which helps reduce screentime.

I am a big fan of my phone being in grayscale, which reduces screentime and cuts into into how attention-grabbing the bright red app badges are.

Letterboxd has an API but it's available by request only.

Reddit has been recently ramping up their "Popular post in" and other community notifications.

There was a recent tweet I saw saying "I’m willing to bet my entire net worth on neither the median nor the average American reading 11 books a year."

Kirsten Dunst had a great moment in a 2016 Hollywood Reporter roundtable in response to actresses lamenting that they don't work with female directors, saying that "[she's] worked with so many female directors" and that "it's up to us as actresses to give…

I recently watched the 1981 movie Possession by Andrzej Żuławski.

Apple recently added transcripts to their Podcasts app, quickly becoming one of my favorite new features.

My brother has a website (https://spencerbeals.com, go buy some art!)

Speedrunning is when you try to complete a video game as fast as possible.

I subscribe to a lot of email newsletters (Vox, We're Here, Tom Scott, Money Stuff and Heatmap News among many others) all of which I enjoy...but maybe don't always read.

The iOS compass app is great for pointing north.

The average American spends 4h30m on their phone each day.

Fitness SF has a number of great gyms around the Bay Area, but their app can be slow to load, and having to open it every time to scan in was annoying.

I have the Roborock S7 MaxV, and it's fantastic.

The Books app on iPhone (previously named iBooks) allows you to highlight text and leave notes.